or implicit propaganda’, Letter in Left Review, February 1935); but the fact surely is that in the white heat of composition it turned into a method of thinking about contemporary morals and politics in aesthetic terms—thinking by means of the images which we call characters. Gibbon’s aesthetic thought points to conclusions somewhat different from the sort he was accustomed to formulate in articles or arguments with friends. As Ewan says:
There will always be you and I, I think, Mother. It’s the old fight that maybe will never have a finish, whatever the names we give to it—the fight in the end between FREEDOM and GOD.
It is Chris whose whole being is inseparable from the truth, justice and freedom which Muir claimed were such strong values for Gibbon, and Ewan whose communism is religious at bottom, as Ma Cleghorn notes quite early in the book:
she wouldn’t trust Ewan, a fine loon, but that daft-like glower in his eyes—Och, this communism stuff’s not canny, I tell you, it’s just a eligion though the Reds say it’s not and make out that they don’t believe in God. They’re dafter about Him than the Salvationists are, and once it gets under a body’s skin he’ll claw at the itch till he’s tirred himself.
It would seem likely, then, that Chris’s oblivion on the hilltop must have something to do with Freedom and God. In W.K. Malcolm’s interpretation, it signalizes a union between the two categories attained by Chris on the very last page, ‘for just before she finally becomes insensate to the feel of the rain and oblivious to the noise of the passing lapwings, she ultimately recognizes God in the constant working and reworking of her natural surroundings, identifying the power of Change which holds sway over life as the final truth.’13 This is quite some distance from earlier allegorical interpretations which identified Chris with the Land or the Scottish nation, and saw her ‘death’ as symbolizing both the final destruction of the peasantry and the end of Scotland, and indeed of all other nations, in favour of the proletarian internationalism of the industrial working class. One mystical experience is balanced against another—Ewan’s visionary identification with all the oppressed, and Chris’s recognition of God in the ever-changing natural world—and each epiphany is, in the last resort, religious.
Thomas Crawford
NOTES TO INTRODUCTION. MSS in the National Library of Scotland are quoted by kind permission of the NLS and of Gibbon’s daughter, Mrs Rhea Martin.
1. Letter to Gibbon, 29 January 1935, NLS MS. Acc. 26065 (8).
2. Doubleday Circular of 30 January 1935, NLS MS. Acc. 26065 (15).
3. Listener, 5 December 1934.
4. Ian S. Munro, Leslie Mitchell: Lewis Grassic Gibbon (Edinburgh, 1966), p.71.
5. Ian Campbell, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon and the Mearns’, in A Sense of Place, ed. Graeme Cruickshank (Edinburgh, 1988), p.18.
6. Munro, p.71.
7. ‘Action and Narrative Stance in A Scots Quair’, in Literature of the North, ed. David Hewitt and Michael Spiller (Aberdeen, 1983), p.117.
8. NLS MS. Acc. 26109 (61).
9. William Κ. Malcolm, A Blasphemer and Reformer (Aberdeen, 1984), pp. 157–70.
10. Ian Milner, ‘An Estimation of A Scots Quair’, in Marxist Quarterly I (4),1954, p.214. Similar points were made by Jessie Koçsmanova, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Pioneer of Socialist Realism’, in Journal of Brno University (1955), and by John Mitchell in his Epilogue to the East German translation of Grey Granite (1974).
11. Deirdre Burton, ‘A Feminist Reading of A Scots Quair’, in The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century, ed. J. Hawthorn (London, 1984), p.45.
12. Edwin Muir, ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon: An Appreciation’, in Scottish Standard I (March 1935), pp.23–4.
13. Malcolm, p. 184.
The present text follows that of the first edition as scrupulously as possible, except in such matters of typographical styling as the use of small capitals, not italic capitals, for words emphasized in direct speech. Misprints that were not picked up in later editions have been corrected, and the map of ‘The Land of A Scots Quair’ has been prepared from the one in the first edition.
A typescript of Grey Granite survives, all but the last page, in NLS MS Acc. 26042. It includes phrases and short passages which Gibbon altered for his final version. Thus at p.1, line 10, the typescript reads ‘and paused, breathing deeply, she could hear her heart, afore tackling the chave of the climb’, and at p.2, line 3, ‘And at sixty, with sweirty and creash combined, they’ll have carted you off to the creamery!’ Sometimes there is a weakening of the Scots, as at p.3, line 18, where the typescript has ‘hap of the fog’, the printed text ‘peace’. The NLS also has a complete set of uncorrected galley proofs. These appear to embody all corrections made on first proof: a spot check revealed no differences from the published text.
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